Coming to the end of February, with Valentine’s Day long passed, we also come to the end of our monthly theme on love. You’ll either be basking still in the warm glow of affection, or feeling as wilted as the bouquets now look in their vases. Hopelessly in love or hopeless at love, here are a few characters who are a bit of both.
Discovering Lena Dunham’s hit TV series Girls was a light-bulb moment for me. It was as if somebody had taken my disastrous early twenties, transported them to New York City, cast them in a mellow, instagrammed hue, added an achingly-cool soundtrack and committed them to screen. I was elated, I raised my frustrated fists to the sky and shouted ‘yessss!’ Read more…
As the V&A celebrate marriage in their Wedding Dress exhibition, 4th Estate looks at marriage from Shakespeare’s happily-ever-after comedies to the ‘it’s complicated’ world of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot.
To read the extract of Jeffrey Eugenides’ ‘The Marriage Plot’ click the reader below. To download it to your e-reader, follow the link through to issuu and download the PDF.
Although it’s not published until October 11th, early reviews for Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel ‘The Marriage Plot’ have started to come in from the US.
Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly had to say:
“Eugenides’s first novel since 2002’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Middlesex so impressively, ambitiously breaks the mold of its predecessor that it calls for the founding of a new prize to recognize its success both as a novel–and as a Jeffrey Eugenides novel. Importantly but unobtrusively set in the early 1980s, this is the tale of Madeleine Hanna, recent Brown University English grad, and her admirer Mitchell Grammaticus, who opts out of Divinity School to walk the earth as an ersatz pilgrim. Madeleine is equally caught up, both with the postmodern vogue (Derrida, Barthes)–conflicting with her love of James, Austen, and Salinger–and with the brilliant Leonard Bankhead, whom she met in semiotics class and whose fits of manic depression jeopardize his suitability as a marriage prospect. Read more…
